


a truth as smooth as poison

by goldbooksblack



Category: The Folk of the Air - Holly Black
Genre: F/M, Requested from Tumblr, cardan is a lil bitch who regrets everything, jude finally gets some good fucking food™, my OC just wants some friends
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-28 15:41:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19815340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/goldbooksblack/pseuds/goldbooksblack
Summary: Requested on Tumblr:could you possibly do a jurdan fic - post TWK? Maybe Jude finds a friend in the mortal world, and Cardan gets a bit jealous? Cos he thinks there's something between them. But they're just really good friends.~*~“I . . .” Peter laughs nervously. “I mean, I get the feeling you’re not really the lying type—” Jude nearly lets herself give him a rueful smile “—but I mean . . . magic? Fairies? Royalty? It seems like something out of a book.”





	a truth as smooth as poison

Cardan has stopped taking lovers.

It is a fact that the court talks about incessantly, glancing towards the throne and whispering. They say the young king has lost his appetite. They say that the young king has been poisoned. They say that the young king has been ruined by his mortal seneschal, though this is a far more unpopular theory. 

Still though, there must be a reason why Faerie has seen no sun, no fair winds for the past six months. Why it has been all dark skies and terrible thunderstorms. 

~*~

“Jude, you need to get up.” 

“No.”

“Are you dead?” Oak’s head peers out from behind Vivi’s torso. 

Jude groans and twists underneath her blanket, picking up a pillow and smashing it into her face. She breathes heavily through it before Vivi tears it away from her. “Jude. Get up.”

She peers blearily at her sister, who has her hands on her hips. “No.” 

“You’re not setting a very good example for Oak.”

Jude jerks his head towards the kitchen. “I don’t think he’s paying much attention.” Oak is wreaking havoc, shaking a box of Lucky Charms so hard that Jude sees rainbow marshmallows leaping to their death. 

Vivi sighs. “Jude, I know how hard this has been for you—”

“—no,” Jude snaps. “You don’t.”

“Be that as it may,” her sister concedes, “you can’t go on like this.”

“And why not?” She demands.

“Because,” Vivi tears the blankets off of her and Jude whimpers from the sudden chill. “You’re going to regret it.”

“Vivi.” She sits up. “There’s nothing I can do.”

“There’s nothing you can do to go back. the situation. Look, I know you hate the mortal world, but you’re stuck here now. And you might as well try to adapt to it.” Vivi sits down next to her. “You can start by taking Oak to school.”

“Vivi!” Oak hollers from the kitchen. The patter of bare feet follows. “We’re out of cereal.” 

~*~

Jude walks up the stairs of the apartment building. Vivi is out somewhere (probably hoping to run into Heather again), and she doesn’t have to pick up Oak until three. Great. She has time to turn on the TV, plop on the couch, and tuck herself into a blanket burrito. 

To think that she had once been a queen. 

Jude clenches her fist. In the first few days after her banishment, she had been too numb to take her wedding ring off. Some nights she would wake up in a cold sweat after a nightmare to find that her ruby had sliced into her palm from the force of her grip. Now the ring was gone, stuffed into a pocket of her bag. She hadn’t had the heart to throw it away, though it reminded her of the one person she never wanted to see again. 

Not that she would ever have the chance to.

Jude unlocks the front door and is about to step into the apartment when someone coughs nervously behind her. She whirls around, her instincts pricking. 

“Um … hi.” The voice belongs to a gangly boy, aged around 20, with mousy brown hair and big blue eyes. Jude raises an eyebrow and says nothing. He gulps visibly. “Hi. Hello. I’m, um, I’m your neighbor. Across the hall. I’m Peter.” He stuck out his hand. 

Jude takes it, with caution. “It’s nice to meet you, Peter.” She forces the words out. Greetings are always so candied, so saccharine in the mortal world. She turns away from Peter. 

“Wait! Um, I … uh. What’s … your name?” 

Jude halts. This boy is clearly nervous and afraid of her. Yet he still had the balls to ask her for her name. He’s no Court of Shadows spy, but since he asked … 

“It’s Jude,” she says, turning back to him. 

He nods. And nods. “Jude … right.” Peter scratches his head. “It’s nice to meet you too.” 

They stare at each other. And stare. Peter seems like he doesn’t know if he should leave or not, and Jude gets a kick out of making him squirm. At last, she makes the move. “I have business to attend to.” 

He shakes himself out of his reverie. “Right! Yes! Well, um, if you happen to need anything …” He points at his door. “I’m right … across the hall.” 

As soon as she is in the apartment, Jude does exactly as she planned. She turns on the TV, gets a pint of mint chocolate chip ice cream, and bundles herself into a blanket. 

There is one part of her routine that is out of the ordinary, though.

“Peter,” she says out loud to herself. “Huh.”

~*~

They meet again the following week. At Vivi’s pestering, Jude finally goes out to seek a job. She’s not sure what kind of establishment will take a seventeen year old girl with no education, but Vivi assures her that she can still find work at a fast food restaurant. Not that Jude has any idea what those are. 

She is surprisingly nervous to go out asking for work. Or maybe that’s just the pride in her talking. Never before has she had to go out and beg for people to take her in. She has always fought for what she wants, and to lose control of that free agency is … 

Beyond mortifying. 

Still, she sighs and shuts the apartment door behind her, locking it securely. Jude presses the button for the lobby in the elevator (another mortal oddity) and watches the doors close. 

“Wait! Hold the elevator!” An arm comes poking through the two doors and Jude is about to yell that the owner of the haywire limb is going to get it amputated before shockingly, the doors spring back as if repelled by the arm. Curious, Jude stares at them. 

“Sorry,” Peter pants, stepping in.

“Peter.”

“Oh, it’s you …” He sounds as if she is the last person he’d wanted to see. “How are you, Jude?”

“I am … fine.” The words taste acrid on her tongue. No one has really asked her how she is feeling since she arrived half a year ago. It is a strange question, almost painful in its address. 

Peter blinks. “Good. Great!” 

They travel down several floors before Jude turns to him. “Peter, do you know what a … fast food restaurant is?”

“Like … McDonald’s?”

Jude has seen some McDonald’s. They are all red and yellow and their symbol is some sort of adult man covered in white paint. “Perhaps.”

“What’s your interest?”

“It’s none of your—” she stops herself. Peter already looks half frightened to death from speaking to her. “I mean, I am looking for a job.” 

“Oh. But you’re like … really young.”

“Yes,” Jude says, feeling defensive. “Is that a problem?”

“No,” says Peter, his voice still nervous. “But they might ask you for working papers.”

Jude has no idea why people would need papers to work. She’s literally offering to work for them. What more could they want from her?

But she swallows her pride. “Can you help me get them?”

He looks completely taken aback. “I—uh, yeah, sure! Yes.”

~*~

“He is still in his room?” 

The Roach nods gravely. “I have tried everything. Short of breaking down his door and snatching him up from bed.” 

The Bomb shakes her head. “The King’s council is squirming.”

Her colleague jerks his head at the closed bedroom door. “You are certainly welcome to take a crack at it.”

She sighs and pounds her fist on the door. “My king!” She calls. “My king?”

No answer. The Bomb turns back to the Roach, who leans against a column picking at dirt underneath his fingernails. “This qualifies as a national emergency, right?”

The Roach pretends to think about it. “Yes.”

“Great.” With one solid kick, the door breaks open. 

The Bomb creeps inside. The room is almost completely dark, shaded by dark curtains made of thick fabric. A few stray sunbeams peek through, casting long, thin strips of light on the cluttered floor. She steps over a maze of empty bottles of wine; the king’s chambers are vast, and it takes her a few minutes to find the monarch in question, limp in bed, a sheet pulled over his head. 

For a split second she fears that Cardan has actually managed to strangle himself in a drunken stupor, before she leans in close to his ear. “Cardan. Cardan!” Her loud shout causes him to jerk wide awake, onyx eyes wide. He bolts upright. 

He blinks a few times before realizing where he is. The Bomb waits patiently. Cardan’s eyes narrow at her. “Have you no respect for your king?” He demanded.

“My lord, your advisers have been waiting for you for the past fortnight,” she says, soothing but steely. 

“Then I shall go meet them,” Cardan mumbles. He makes it one step out of bed before he crashes to the floor.

The Bomb sighs. The entire Court of Shadows has experienced nothing but deep sympathy and resentment towards the king for the past few months. Sympathy because of the state he was in. Resentment because he had taken away their de facto leader and it was that decision that had landed him in this position in the first place. Had Jude stayed, she doubted that any of this would have happened. The darkening of Elfhame’s skies, the excessive drinking, the gossip. Jude would have found a way to end it. She would have outflanked their enemies. Now, their enemies are far and away, plotting to storm in at any moment. 

“My king?” The Bomb verbally prods. There is no answer. It seems as though Cardan has passed out cold. Again. She sighs. And prays for their queen to return. 

Soon. 

~*~

A week on the job, and Jude feels as if she might stab the eyes out of each one of her colleagues. It would certainly make the days pass more quickly. 

First off, her manager Krystal (clearly mortals don’t know how to spell) has approached her and the other employees every single day with a sickening greeting. “Hi guys! Let’s make today the best day we can make it!” Jude has had to stop herself from rolling her eyes to the back of her skull every single time. She’d originally suspected that Krystal had been trying to weasel secrets out of her every time she’d sidled up to Jude on their lunch break, asking her questions like do you have siblings? and so, are you seeing anyone? and gosh, isn’t it such a nice day? But Krystal had seemed generally harmless. For now. 

Then there’s Luke. Luke is the burger flipper (or “grill master” as Krystal likes to say), although most of the time his eyes seem to be more focused on Jude’s cleavage than the patties. If it wasn’t supposedly against the law to kill him, Jude would have done it with a plastic fork between the eyes. 

Claire works next to her at the ice cream machine. She doesn’t do much, mainly because the ice cream machine is always broken. 

This is how the Queen of Elfhame passed her days. Filling paper bags with fries and dealing with angry middle aged men and young, snobby mothers who insist that everything Jude gives them must be “safe for my baby.” The kitchen is literally right behind the counter. Do they not see what goes into their food? Jude is fairly certain no one should be eating from her restaurant, lest they risk all sorts of fatal diseases. 

“Hello, how may I help you today?” Jude drones, eyes fixed on the register. 

“Jude?” She looks up at the sound of that voice. Peter stands in front of her, blue eyes wide. 

“Peter.” 

“I didn’t know you worked here,” he says lamely. 

“Well, I do.”

“Hurry up!” Shouts a balding, irate man three people down the line. “People have places to be—” he stops short at the sight of Jude’s murderous gaze. The queen’s still got it. 

She rests one hand on the top of the register’s screen. “May I take your order?” 

“What? Oh, yeah.” Peter looks as though he’s just remembered why he’s standing in front of her. “Can I get a number six, double cheeseburger meal?” 

“Sure,” says Jude flatly. 

“Jude?” He says after a brief pause. She makes eye contact with him. He’s fiddling with a button on his shirt. “Do you think . . . maybe you’d like to . . . um, meet up after your shift?”

The words send an unwilling shiver down her skin. Jude has not been alone with a man since Cardan. She never planned for it either, not after nights of shaking in the dark and weeping. But . . . she looks at Peter again, rocking from one foot to another. He is so different from Cardan that it nearly incites a visceral reaction from her. 

“Hey, Jude!” She rolls her eyes as Krystal’s playful chirp reaches her ears. “I love, love, love that you’re making great conversation with our customers, but we still have a lot to go, so if you could wrap it up soon, that would be amazing.” 

“Fine,” she tells Peter. “My shift ends at two.”

~*~

Walking back to her apartment with a companion is a strange experience. With Vivi or Oak, Jude would have been occupied in strange conversations, such as the price of slime at Target (Oak) or how to accentuate one’s facial structure using powdered glitter (Vivi). But with Peter, there is none of that. Only silence. Jude is mostly at ease, her trepidation easy to hide. Peter, however, openly fidgets with a button on his shirt. He wouldn’t last a day in Faerie. 

But that was of no consequence. Not here, in the mortal world. Here, one can be as conspicuously vulnerable as one wants. 

“So, uh . . . you haven’t been here long, right?”

She narrows her eyes. “What do you mean?” They enter the elevator and Peter presses their floor button for them.

“I mean, like, the first time I saw you was like, only a month or two ago.” 

“So?” 

“I . . . uh . . .” Peter laughs nervously. “I was just curious.”

“About what?” The elevator dings and the doors open. 

“About . . .” He sticks his hands in his pocket. “Where you were before you got here.”

“Where I was?” The words taste almost foreign in Jude’s mouth. 

“Yeah. I mean, unless you don’t feel comfortable, because I know you—well, you seem like a pretty private person.” Peter stammers. He stops suddenly in the hallway and Jude realizes that they have arrived in front of their respective doors. She leans against hers, back to the wood. One hand on the handle. Peter faces hers, expression quizzical. Silence falls between them.

Then, finally, Jude nods. “Come in.” 

~*~

Cardan hangs his head in his hands. 

He knows, he knows, he knows. He knows his ministers are whispering amongst themselves. He knows his advisors are plotting against him. He knows even the debauchers of his court have abandoned him for louder, brighter things. 

But without Jude, these may as well be problems in the distance. He has no way of resolving them, so why bother? 

Except he tries. He tries. Everyone sees him hungover in the morning, but no one sees him sitting in his study for hours attempting to read reports before turning to the bottle. He reads the reports until the words blur together and all he can see in his mind is his wife, and he pours himself a glass of wine and another and another. 

This morning, sitting on the edge of his bed, he is violently sick. He thinks he might actually be ill, an unfortunate mix of hangover and fever. But despite feeling as though his bones might melt into his skin, he picks himself up. He gets dressed. Then, after expunging the last of his stomach contents out into a chamberpot, he exits. 

The Roach almost starts at the sight of him. “My king,” he says from his sentinel post outside Cardan’s chambers. 

“Roach,” Cardan says, and his view of the room seems just a little off-kilter. Just slightly. “I am going out.”

He bows his head respectfully, though Cardan knows he is probably seconds away from calling for the Bomb. “Of course. To where?”

Cardan draws his coat tighter around him. He feels quite a fool, walking out dressed in mortal clothing and expecting the Roach not to guess what he is about to do. “Out.” 

The spy raises an eyebrow, but says nothing, and Cardan takes his departure. 

He would see his wife. He couldn’t stand it any longer, this exile. Just like him to inflict punishment on someone else and then have it backfire. He seemed unable to do anything correctly.

~*~

“So . . .” Peter hesitates. “Let me know if I’ve got this right.” Jude nods. “Your parents were killed by a Fae warrior guy who also adopted you, you lived for seventeen years with fairies, and you married the king? So you’re a queen?”

“Theoretically.” Jude leans against the sofa, both of them sat on the floor. 

“But then your husband exiled you.”

“Yes.” It feels awfully strange to say it so simply, and without curling her fingers into fists. Here, sitting with Peter, it feels as though she can let go of all her bitterness. As though she can . . . move on.

It is a dangerous feeling. 

“Right.” Peter nods his head.

“Do you think I’m lying?”

“I . . .” Peter laughs nervously. “I mean, I get the feeling you’re not really the lying type—” Jude nearly lets herself give him a rueful smile “—but I mean . . . magic? Fairies? Royalty? It seems like something out of a book.”

She nods. “I know.” 

A chime sounds from underneath her, and she realizes she’s been sitting on her phone for the past few hours. It’s a text from Vivi, telling her that she and Oak are going to go see a movie and that there are leftovers in the fridge if Jude is hungry. 

“What is it?” Peter asks.

“Oh, nothing. My siblings are going to go see a movie. They won’t be back until late.”

“Oh.” He hesitates. “Well, in that case . . . Jude, do you want to get something to eat with me?” The surprise and hesitation must be written on her face, because Peter continues hastily, “I know . . . I mean, I’m guessing that being alone with . . . a guy . . . must be kinda weird, you know, after the whole ‘my husband exiled me thing’ but . . . I mean, we’re just friends, right?” 

“Friends,” Jude repeats, but not without a hint of a question in the word. 

Were she and Peter friends? She hardly knew him. In Faerie, she would have taken the time to rat out every small detail about him before even pausing to think about spending time with him. But here she was, telling him her whole damn life story. Friends. A foreign concept. Had she ever had friends? The Roach, perhaps. Maybe the Bomb. But they were colleagues as well as friends. Their time had been comprised of trying to keep the king and each other from dying. 

“Yes,” she says, and it is a declaration that she doesn’t think she can take back. “We are friends.”

Peter smiles faintly, a gentle expression. “After you, then,” he says, gesturing to the door. “I know a great pizza place on Main.”

“Is it Pizza Hut?” Jude would never admit it, but she’s developed something of a fondness for the oily, overprocessed cheese dough made by disgruntled employees. 

“No, it’s so much better than Pizza Hut.”

“That’s impossible.”

“Seriously? Pizza Hut? You can’t at least be a Domino’s girl?” 

“I tried Domino’s. It was awful.” 

“Oh, but you like Pizza Hut? That’s a travesty . . .”

~*~

Cardan looks up at the gray stone building. Sun has already set by the time he arrives in front of Jude’s apartment building. He wonders if he should go in. He could compel the doorman to tell him where to find his wife. He could . . . 

The king stuffs his hands in his jacket pockets. People walk around him, ignoring him. It almost reminds him of being a child, when his father’s courtiers would ignore him in favor of his older siblings. He would rage and demand attention before he realized that he would never receive it. But there is none of that here, none of that anger. Only a settled feeling of being hidden as the crowd passes him by. 

He stands at the door for a long time before deciding to move on. Cardan has only been in the mortal world so many times; curiosity gets the better of him and he begins to walk around. He passes throngs of couples holding hands, standing in front of brightly lit stores, brighter than anything in Faerie. He sees mothers tugging their toddlers’ hands, girls giggling with each other, boys holding orange balls underneath their arms. It is a kind of cruel hiraeth, his time in the mortal world. Something he has never longed for, but is consumed with wanting. 

At last he wanders onto a street characterized by the amalgamation of different aromas in the air. He smells herbs, and sour, and sweet, and things he cannot describe. There is food he has never seen in the windows, pastries he could have never dreamt up. But then he looks into the windows of a restaurant where the thick aroma of fragrant tomatoes drift away and he sees them. 

His wife laughing. A young man across the table smiling. 

Something in the king tears into two. Half of him wants to storm in and rage at her, grab her by the arm and drag her back to Faerie, exile be damned. The other half . . . 

The other half stands outside and watches. Rain begins to fall, and something inside him registers dimly that this is the mortal world, that his emotions do not impact the weather. The cold rain mixes with the hot tears tracking down his face. Nothing, not even the past few weeks without Jude, can compare to the burning feeling of standing outside like a jilted bride outside this restaurant. 

Cardan stands outside in the pouring rain for an eternity. Mortals pay him no attention, the crowd parting and closing around him as they pass him by. He only has himself to blame for this, and it is a truth that he swallows as smoothly as poison. He closes his eyes. And breathes.

And at long last, the king turns away from the sight of his queen with another, and walks back towards his horse, waiting to take him home.

~*~

“I do think we shall never see the sun again,” a courtier mentions to him. “It has been dark

for months and months.”

“Yes,” replies Locke. “And at the king’s will, no less.”

**Author's Note:**

> If you'd like to send me a request, check out my Tumblr!
> 
> [goldbooksblack](https://goldbooksblack.tumblr.com/) for more!


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